Welcome to the One Synth Challenge #122! OSC is a friendly music competition where you can win cool prizes but most importantly, meet amazing musicians, and learn a lot about mixing, sound design, and more!

A powerful Subtractive hybrid synthesizer formerly by Vember Audio, now open sourced. It should work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. There are even a few contributions by Oscers z.prime, and rgvhdberg!

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Special Note:
We are offering a secondary prize (on top of the normal prize): FXB Project, or JRR Shop (Uncle E)
Spotify: If you would like your winning track on spotify, please specify so as well, or you will be contacted by rghvdberg.

I've been working with Surge for the last couple of months and I love it.

It's been very stable for me, except for one issue: I'm getting some big sound explosions / dropouts that don't sound very healthy - especially with a lot of tracks. I think the developers are working on it. I don't know if it can blow your speakers or anything, but the first thing I do on every project is to put a limiter on the master, so I have control over the output. I recommend you do it, too!

I have a pet theory that it's connected to the release times of the amp envelope, because a short release is the only thing that directly removes the problem for me, but I have no idea, really...

Yeah, I would advise caution as well. [Edit: see the discussion below, the fresh nightly build works wonders!] It's not quite ready for stress free operation in many hosts just yet ... [Edit: except... yep, see below etc, I'm just leaving the rest of this post as is for historical consistency, haha.] Live and Logic are some of the affected ones.

Z.prime kindly forwarded my description of the error from the last OSC thread to the project's issue tracker; this was the first time I used Surge, and I got exactly those overloading nasties you describe there, schiing. Had to reload many, many times -- and also remember to save your patches when you have changed something, that way you can just reload a failed Surge instance and the patch, instead of reloading the whole project and hoping every single instance loads okay. A successful complete load like that didn't happen at all in Live 10 for me after the project got fully going

I peeked at the issue tracker recently myself, and it seems this might be related to multiple possible error states that can arise, but I think the most important one is initializing the plugin without explicitly setting a sample rate in the instance (at least that's what I gathered from how it's described by the devs). This refers to the internal workings of the plugin and how it interacts with a given host, and isn't something the user can solve through the plugin interface. It's being looked into at present, and currently this means Surge instances can fail when loading your project in some hosts, making some copies of it play those loud popping noises in Live 10 for example, instead of containing(?)/sounding the patches they were supposed to.

So... protect your ears and your speakers (with a limiter and keeping the levels relatively quiet) and your nerves (by keeping current saves of individual patches up to date) . With some luck, you won't see these issues, and with some MORE luck this might even be fixed before this OSC round is over.

But yeah, imo the optimal way to go about it would be to wait until this is fixed, Surge is a great great synth and at the moment this makes it somewhat unfairly cumbersome to use for some. That being said, the OSC has seen some extremely challenging synths in the usability department before, anyway, so I don't think this poses that much difficulty. Would just be nice if it worked as intended, hah.

If I enter this round, I might go with Reaper this time, as I wasn't able to make Surge fail there in the same manner ...

Last edited by Guenon on Mon Apr 01, 2019 2:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I've been working with Surge for the last couple of months and I love it.

It's been very stable for me, except for one issue: I'm getting some big sound explosions / dropouts that don't sound very healthy - especially with a lot of tracks. I think the developers are working on it. I don't know if it can blow your speakers or anything, but the first thing I do on every project is to put a limiter on the master, so I have control over the output. I recommend you do it, too!

I have a pet theory that it's connected to the release times of the amp envelope, because a short release is the only thing that directly removes the problem for me, but I have no idea, really...

Have fun!

I found and fixed this today. (Seriously. Not April fools). If you grab the nightly as opposed to beta 7 it shouldn’t happen.

The problem I fixed - but which I think is the one you see - was a bit different; one of the filters wasn’t properly initialized so read random memory. It would then eventually go unstable and send a massive signal down the pipe and then remain basically broken.

We’ll cut beta 8 soon enough but if you are cursed by this the nightlies are your friend. Also the nightlies contain a few other fixes since beta 7, mostly involving MPE but also one memory leak gone.

I found and fixed this today. (Seriously. Not April fools). If you grab the nightly as opposed to beta 7 it shouldn’t happen.

The problem I fixed - but which I think is the one you see - was a bit different; one of the filters wasn’t properly initialized so read random memory. It would then eventually go unstable and send a massive signal down the pipe and then remain basically broken.

We’ll cut beta 8 soon enough but if you are cursed by this the nightlies are your friend. Also the nightlies contain a few other fixes since beta 7, mostly involving MPE but also one memory leak gone.

Wonderful news! You're a (bacon) angel (the best kind!) Thanks so much. Probably a silly question, but I thought I'd ask, just in case:

Is there a chance installing the latest build will affect sounds and presets in my ongoing projects? I usually like to finish my current work before I start messing with the dll's, but it would be great to get rid of those bursts.

I could trigger the loud popping issue when I duplicate tracks on Reaper with a Surge instance and start using the new instance. Surge would send to only a left or right channel and basically pop. Restarting Reaper would magically fix the issue.

I've been involved getting Surge running on Mac and some other aspects of the project, so I'll try to help where I can.

@baconpaul is the mastermind who's done the majority of fixes/work (especially zoom -- so thank him loudly)

also from @baconpaul, on slack:

basics on surge:
1/ Opensourced last september
2/ First version had loads of bugs and only built win64
3/ Group of us been fixing up bugs and adding thigns since nov or so
4/ Now works pretty well on Mac, Win and Lin all
Known problems include
1/ If you set zoom, quit DAW, and restart DAW it forgets zoom. You can set a “default first zoom” in the menu
2/ There’s a big “click and pop” in beta 7. I just fixed that today and we are building a nightly
3/ Lots of small bugs with things like midi program change
4/ If you open your own wave tables and you haven’t made them .wt files it will probably crash (win) and not work (mac/lin)
There’s another 119 github issues though so lots of other problems
the website surge-synthesizer.github.io/ contains beta 7 (and soon beta ; but also has nightlies which (once we have them working again in an hour or so) are the latest greatest build.
Finally: Big thanks to kurasu / Claes of bitwig for chosing to make Surge GPL3 rather than just letting it rot. Nice synth and fun project!

Surge would send to only a left or right channel and basically pop. Restarting Reaper would magically fix the issue.

Hey yeah, that's a good point (the overloading not being symmetric, and instead always spiking in the left or right channel much more than the other). It was exactly like that in Live for me, I forgot to mention that detail previously. Interesting that it's doing this in Reaper there, I wasn't able to reproduce it in that one.

Surge would send to only a left or right channel and basically pop. Restarting Reaper would magically fix the issue.

Hey yeah, that's a good point (the overloading not being symmetric, and instead always spiking in the left or right channel much more than the other). It was exactly like that in Live for me, I forgot to mention that detail previously. Interesting that it's doing this in Reaper there, I wasn't able to reproduce it in that one.

Anyway, here's to hoping these pops are just history in a moment

The problem was that the filter history and coefficient were set to random memory and usually that random memory was high frequency and small enough to get damped by the filter. But if you got unlucky one channel got a value which sent the filter off the deep end. Hence an asymmetric non predictable one side pop. I was able to trap it in the headless mode and once I fixed it I ran 20,000 surges with random patches playing a c major scale and got no pop. So I’m pretty confident... but really welcome reports!

Is there a chance installing the latest build will affect sounds and presets in my ongoing projects? I usually like to finish my current work before I start messing with the dll's, but it would be great to get rid of those bursts.

No. With all the 1.6 we are keeping patch streaming compatibility. So unless I blew something up it should just work. I tested exactly the scenario you mention and got identical sounds (except no random pops).